Summoning Synchronicity

Summoning Synchronicity

By Bill Tarrant

Over the past two years or so, scores of people in Europe and America joined in an unprecedented “synchronicity experiment” using one of the world’s most ancient texts, the I Ching or “Book of Changes.”

I participated in the controversial experiment (more on that below). I’ve been consulting the I Ching as a decision-making tool for over a half-century. And this was the first time I had encountered a like-minded community, though I kept looking for one during my decades in Asia as a foreign correspondent.

Gabriel Felley, a professor of business informatics at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, convened the experiment in December 2021. Instead of a person-to-oracle approach, Felley wanted to see what would happen if a large cohort of people asked the I Ching the same question. Would the results yield a cluster of similar answers?

The questions, a different one posed each month, were mostly concerned with current events: the war in Ukraine, the social impact of AI, the rise of income inequality, the backlash against immigration, the rise of political populism, among other topics.

Participants – at the peak of the experiment there were up to 170 of us - tossed the three (preferably Chinese) coins or the less commonly used yarrow sticks (from the flowering plant of that name) to construct a hexagram image. These consist of six solid or broken yin/yang lines. There are 64 of them in Book of Changes, meant to catalog a set of universal archetypes.

The results were still being collated when the experiment abruptly ended after the 40-year-old Djohi Centre for I Ching studies withdrew its support. The institute had hosted the experiment on its platform.

Felley, who designed the program for the experiment told me in a Zoom call: “We had 4-6 hexagrams occur 3-4 times more than any other,” for many of the answers to questions. But the results were still being collated and Felley’s preliminary report is no longer available on the Djohi platform.

“They said the I Ching is very personal, between the person and the I Ching,” Felley said. “For the Djohi, it was like a sin (doing the group experiment).”

At the beginning, the Djohi Centre, founded in 1984, saw the experiment as inducing a possible “revival” of interest in the I Ching and for the Djohi Centre as well, Felley said.

The Djohi Centre has not responded to a request for comment.

Felley called the experiment “Summoning Synchronicity” in a nod to the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung.

One of Jung’s most notable contributions to psychology was the notion of synchronicity. Coincidences are unrelated events briefly intersecting in time and space. Synchronicity takes the coincidence of events in space and time as meaning something more than mere chance. According to Jung, synchronicity is the intertwining of objective events with the subjective or psychic state of the observer to create meaningful “coincidences” that seem to have no underlying cause. (Some critics in modern psychology dismiss synchronicity as a product of “confirmation bias.”)

Felley says the I Ching is a tool we can use to tap into a “dynamic knowledge field” in the Universe. “This field is like the gravitational field, everywhere active but carrying information instead of gravitational energy and cannot be measured by scientific methods. It’s probably similar to what C.G. Jung called the ‘collective unconscious’.”

The I Ching oracle doesn’t try to “predict the future,” but instead shows the synchronicities and patterns behind the question, allowing one to make wise decisions about the future. ”It reveals the influences acting in the moment of questioning,” Felley says. “Using the I Ching may be comparable to using a GPS to decide the route you want to go. Different alternatives are given to the driver.”

The I Ching remained an arcane and mysterious text even in China, where it was first compiled around 3,500 years ago. It found a small audience in the West with Richard Wilhelm’s ground-breaking 1924 German translation, and especially after a Jungian disciple, Cary F. Baynes, provided the English translation published in 1950.

Jung himself wrote the foreword for the English translation, noting his theory of synchronicity has its corollary in the Book of Changes.

“While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture of the moment encompasses everything down to the minutest detail, because all of the ingredients make up the observed moment.”

Jung noted the parallel between the I Ching and the then-emerging field of quantum mechanics: “The ancient Chinese mind contemplates the cosmos in a way comparable to that of the modern physicist ….The microphysical event includes the observer just as much as the reality underlying the I Ching comprises subjective, i.e. Psychic conditions in the totality of the momentary situation.”

Jung developed in the 1930s when the field of quantum mechanics had come to the fore in modern physics. Albert Einstein kicked things off with his revolutionary formula of special relativity: Space is not three-dimensional; time is not a separate entity. Both form a four-dimensional space-time field. Different observers will order events differently in time if they move with different velocities relative to observed events, according to special relativity. This, in effect, modified the whole framework scientists had used to describe nature - not least was Einstein’s famous theorem that mass is nothing but a form of energy.

Felley, who majored in theoretical physics at his Swiss university, likens the space-time field in quantum mechanics to the “information field” of the I Ching. In both cases, he notes the primacy of the observer. “It is very tempting to compare the random-based selection of a hexagram in the I Ching with the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics,” Felley said. He’s referring to the “Schrodinger’s Cat” theorem that all different states are possible in the bizarre subatomic world – until an observer takes a measurement.

There is a leap of faith here, to be sure: Which is that the hexagram is a true rendering of the seeker’s psychic condition, as imbued in the toss of the coins while they concentrate on various aspects of the question. The highly metaphorical and dreamlike language of the I Ching does help to bypass the left brain, as it were, to facilitate a path to the subconscious. That’s the goal anyway.

It is ironic the schism over Felley’s experiment is happening among French intellectuals and not among Confucians in China, where the I Ching is only kept alive by random intellectuals. For ordinary Chinese, it is far more satisfying to get a straight-forward fortune-telling ritual done at the local Taoist temple.

Over the past four decades, Christianity has grown faster in China than anywhere else in the world. Conversely, interest in Easter religions and spirituality has increased in the West even as membership in traditional religions has declined all across the world.

During Mao Tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76) the use of the I Ching for divination was widely regarded as a superstitious, feudal practice.

Felley has made a half-dozen trips to China to meet a university professor trying to revive interest in the Book of Changes as a contemporary tool for decision-making.

“In China, on the street, the Chinese say ‘all this is bullshit. It’s too complicated. Forget about it,’” Felley says. “Unfortunately, their mindset is strongly Westernized; they have lost the richness of their ancient, hidden culture.”

This is the inaugural post in a blog called “My Book of Changes” that will look at what’s going on in the esoteric I Ching world, as well as my often-stuttering attempts to find sages to help in my own exploration.

Bill Tarrant is a former Reuters journalist who worked for over 35 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia.